Dog pack attacks, severely injures Bennett man

BENNETT, Colo. — A pack of dogs attacked a Bennett man and his yellow Labrador last week.

And nearly a week later, Bill Hauet remains in an Aurora hospital recovering from the vicious attack.

“They chewed on my heel over here. This one over here, I got three lacerations right down to the bone,” says Hauet, pointing to his left foot.

The 68-year-old’s body is held together by more than 100 stitches.

He has puncture wounds on both arms and both legs; tubing drains one of his deep wounds.

“Every morning I take my dog Abby for a walk,” he says about the open field easement behind his home in the 41400 block of Highway 36 in Bennett.

But last Tuesday that walk led him on a frightening journey to save his life.

“They went right after Abby. One bit her real good. So, when I chased it away, to let her go, I turned around, one grabbed me in the heel and took me down. Then the other three came and started chewing on me,” says Hauet.

He jumped over a fence to get away, but two dogs followed, and tore into his flesh.

“I wasn’t about to let them get to my throat, if they got to my throat I would have been dead. They were out for blood,” says Hauet.

A bloodied Abby ran home and was able to alert Bill’s wife. She ran out to investigate and found the pack of dogs attacking her husband.

Hauet threw her his cell phone and she called 911.

“The husband is in the pasture and is afraid to move because the dogs are surrounding him apparently,” says a dispatcher on the website Radio Reference, which recorded the emergency call.

Firefighters arrived and turned a hose on the dogs to push them away.

Hauet’s friend found the victim’s leather jacket in shreds.

“When I saw that, I thought, ‘how horrific does this get?” questioned Dave, who didn’t want to give his last name.

The dogs that attacked Hauet are all Boxer-mixes.

Their owner says she feels a lot of pain for what happened to her neighbor and she’s sorry.

She says she understands her dogs will probably never come back. She’s fine with that. But says she’d like to keep one of the dogs her family has had since her children were small.

“If it weren’t for her,” says Hauet about his dog Abby, shuddering to think how long he could have fended off the vicious dogs.

He feels grateful he’s alive and thankful to Abby that she got help.

A plaque in her image says what Hauet feels: “My Hero.”

His feelings for the animals that attacked him are also strong.

“I want all four dogs destroyed,” he says.

Neighbors say those animals have been on the loose several times before.

The dogs’ owner says they escaped by digging a hole under their fence.

The animals remain under quarantine in Adams County until a judge decides what should happen to them.